


Beloved

by meradorm



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Camerashipping, M/M, miles upshur/waylon park - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-31
Updated: 2015-02-05
Packaged: 2018-03-09 23:12:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 26
Words: 6,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3267860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meradorm/pseuds/meradorm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Miles Upshur disappeared a few days ago. </p><p>He tells me where he's going. Leaves me notes. "I think this time it's a big one," he wrote. "Something important." He says it to me like he owes me something. Like he owes somebody something, like he thinks it'll justify his piece of shit life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. [NOTE] Miles Upshur disappeared a few days ago.

He tells me where he's going. Leaves me notes. "I think this time it's a big one," he wrote. "Something important." He says it to me like he owes me something. Like he owes somebody something, like he thinks it'll justify his piece of shit life.

Figured he was in jail. 72 hours in I started calling all the police stations and bail brokers in the state. Couple private security companies. Park rangers, even. I told them his name, I told them his plans. (I know, Miles, I know, I broke the rules, I'm sorry).

Nope, didn't get a call in from thataways, they tell me. Pretty quiet up there, really.

Sure.

Checked all the hospitals. Nothing. He would have had me down as the emergency contact anyway, I think. He doesn't talk about his family. He doesn't have a wife. He's got friends, he's got people he works with, people he trusts, but I'm the one he'd call.

Or at least that's what I tell myself.

I managed to get the intake number and rang up Mount Massive itself. The call wouldn't connect. The phone lines are down up there.

Why?

I'm coming, Miles. I swear to God, I will find you.

And if I can't save you, then I'll tell the world why.


	2. [NOTE] That's his car.

Right at the entrance. The headlights are on. The tracks are washed out. It's been here a few days. His press pass hanging from the mirror. His spare camera on the floor by the brakes.

There's a guard booth here. They should have seen the truck, they should have moved it. This place is empty. Miles, what happened to you?

Mount Massive smells like fire. Not like charcoal, like the grey sad husk the morning after. The asylum is burning. The scent is on the wind and the sky is hazy pink and my eyes are watering, but I don't see the flames.

When I touch the walls it warms my hands.

Car's unlocked. Can't think of anything to do but sit there in front seat with my hands on the steering wheel and stare. This is the last place you were and the last thing you did that I know about. If I can't find you now, then to me you died right here.


	3. [NOTE] He scared the hell out of me.

I blink and he's there. In the passenger's seat. He must have been lying down in the back.

"What are you doing here?" he asks.

He looks tired, and his eyes are wide and scared. But he's alive. He's healthy. He's whole.

Christ, he's so handsome. Why did I never tell him how handsome he was? Every time I see him it hits me all over again.

"Not you," he tells me. "Oh, Christ, you can't be here. Not you. Go. Please. Just turn around and don't look back."

I've never seen him like this in my life. He's scared for me. He's scared shitless.

I say something or another, softly - yeah, sure, I'll take you home - and reach for the key in the ignition and he snaps, "It won't work."

And the car doesn't work. I don't get it. The battery's not drained, the lights are still on.

He's silent.

"For fuck's sake," I say. I can't think of anything better.

He presses his temple against the car window. His face is blank. His lips are chapped and pale. "Why the hell did you have to come here?" he mutters.

I meet his eyes. "You really don't know?"


	4. [NOTE] Fuck!

He was just there a second ago, I swear. ...I must have fallen asleep for a minute. I never know when I'm doing it. Thank God for rumble strips.

Haven't gotten much rest these past few days. Staying up worrying, staying up waiting. When I did sleep I had my cell phone in my hand.

He must be inside. I'm going after him. I'm bringing him home.


	5. [DOCUMENT] The note on the gates.

Get out. You're so fucking stubborn, but I'm begging you, just listen to me, for once in your life, do what I tell you and turn around and don't come back.


	6. [DOCUMENT] The note on the second story window.

Allen, please.


	7. [NOTE] The note on the third story windowsill.

I'll give you whatever you want. Take my car, my apartment, my bank information's in the file cabinet somewhere - I've got video equipment, microphones, just fucking sell it, go somewhere, go back to school. I'll sleep with you. I'll suck your dick. Don't do this to me.


	8. [NOTE] Blood.

It's everywhere. There's dark splatter all the down this hallway and at the other end is a corpse I don't recognize, and when I looked into his dead face all I thought was thank God it's not you.


	9. [DOCUMENT] Fine. Fuck you. Fine.

You want to do something for me. You always did.

Find my camera. It's on the lowest level. Underground.

I'll do everything I can to protect you. I'm always watching. I'm right here.


	10. [DOCUMENT] He's right there.

And against my better judgment I call his name until my throat is hoarse.

He turns the corner from a hallway I didn't hear him walk down and he's on me in a flash, clapping his hand over my mouth, and then somehow we're down on the floor.

I'm on top of him. I don't know we're not fighting until my palm is on his stomach and I feel him move into my touch, and then I find his mouth, and my heart surges along with my lust. I don't know whether to cup his neck or hold him to me or undo his belt, I'm trying to do all of it at once, and all I can think of is I want to make him feel good, I want to make him better. I move down his body, open my mouth down over him clumsily and watch in desperation for his face to go soft. And it does. The color comes back to him. It's a bad angle, my neck is aching. I close my eyes and listen to his breath.

"Don't let me come like this," he tells me, sitting up fast, tugging my hair, pulling me back up over him, and in a moment he's begging, fuck me. Fuck me. It's fumbling and messy and short. It's the best sex I've ever had.

He grips my wrist and kisses my hands, hard, over and over, and he slips my two fingers into his mouth. I fuck him with his head pushed back to the ground. There's a pool of blood six feet away from us. Why are we doing this? Oh God.


	11. [NOTE] It can only happen once

He holds me to him weakly, grips the back of my shirt, and for a moment I think he has too few fingers, and his body feels like smoke, but then it passes, and it's all white light. I lay over him and he brings his lips to my ear so I can listen to his breath slow. It's making me hard again. He smells like ozone and soot. When I pull back to look at his face I see his clothes are spattered with blood, torn in places they weren't before.

I will follow you into hell. I will never leave your side. I will fuck you on this dirty floor every night.


	12. [DOCUMENT] Dear John Letter

I always knew.

You deserved better. Thought I'd clean myself up. Quit drinking. And then I'd come to you. I couldn't do it the other way around, you can't be with someone because you think they'll save you, it never works. I wanted it to work. I wanted you.

I'm so goddamned sorry I didn't tell you when I had the chance.

I didn't leave you. I'm trying to clear your way. I made a haven for you here but it's gone now. Get on your feet. Run.

\- Miles.


	13. [NOTE] I keep hearing that sound.

When we lay together I pressed my face to his chest and I couldn't hear his heart. Instead there was a machine noise, a whirring, it startled me. I pulled back. If Miles noticed then he didn't show it.

I know it wasn't him. I know that if I had lain my hand above his heart I would have felt it beating. 

So why didn't I, then?

It's coming from under the floor, I think. To the lowest level ... 

I need to know what's down there. The elevator's not working right. I have to find a way to get downstairs.


	14. [NOTE] Someone's coming.

I almost called out to them. I thought it was him.

Somebody flipped over a table in this room. I hid behind it just in time.

There are two of them. I think they're twins. There's something wrong with them. 

I took integrated biology as my tech elective freshman year in college. I was lonely, I was scared. I thought it would help me understand something about the way people worked, the way people felt. Their architecture, their machinery. That gap between a warm and living soul and the elementary particles that make up every other object and aspect of existence, some combination of protons and electrons, arranged into somata. Synapses. Electric shock. And then somehow, that becomes love. Becomes repulsion. Becomes memory. I remember lifting the back muscles away from a fetal pig with a pair of tissue forceps. 

I hated it. But I know how all the muscles in the human body fold in.

The things I've been finding, reading, recording. I know this is something that other people did to them. That they're the victims here. I am trying so hard to remember that.

Christ. They're checking the lockers. They're looking for me.

No. No, it was just once. It was just the one locker. I'm all right.

"I can smell him, brother."

He wants my tongue. My _tongue._ And I feel a disgust so deep in me it's like a depth charge, and from the detritus floats a thought that barely feels like mine: _I never wanted anyone to own me._

Oh, fuck. I think they know I'm here.


	15. [DOCUMENT] I just want to say one thing.

I remember one time you were working on something on your laptop. Your brow was creased, you had the tip of your tongue sticking out of your mouth. I leaned over and whispered to Leslie, "Allen's having trouble spelling something." And right on cue you looked up and said, "Uh, does anybody know if there's an em dash in co-operate?" Les just cracked the fuck up. She said "sorry, sorry" and buried her face in her hands laughing and you looked all hurt ... remember? And I was just sitting there mulling over how you've got these little tells, and anybody who spends five minutes with you always knows what you're thinking, and how much of a pain in the ass it is trying to bring you on interviews because they know when you're shocked or disgusted or annoyed ... And then I realized how often I was thinking about you. I was just ... smitten.

Yeah, that was when I knew. I couldn't ignore it anymore. And I guess I must have been looking at you, and I guess I must have been smiling, because Les started asking me if I was planning to go by Miles Li Goh or if I'd keep my maiden name...

For a long time now I've been wanting to tell you that. I've been wanting to tell you a lot of things. Can't remember any of them now. Isn't that always the way?

Your eyes would just follow me across the room, you know? You'd sit there transcribing for me and a bomb could have gone off and you wouldn't have noticed, but I'd get up for two seconds to find a pen and you'd look up and watch. Like it was so important.

It meant everything to me. I don't think you even knew you were doing it.


	16. [NOTE] Who is the Walrider?

"The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved."

That's how it begins. The sermon. The twins bound me and gagged me and I'm going to die here, Miles, I'm going to die.

I still have your spare camera. The one in your truck. I don't think they notice it's still in my hand. Gripping the viewfinder with three of my fingers. My sweat all slick on the plastic.

I've been filming. Like how you would have wanted. Told myself a couple times, there'd be a record. There'd be something to pick out of the ashes. But I don't believe it. Don't feel it the way you did. As if we've tread this road before.

The harvest is past. The summer is ended.

What did you want me to see?

One of them had hesitated.

 _"And there's nothing stopping us now, is there?"_ one of them whispered, his voice quick and hungry and harsh.

"Oh? Has our Father Martin yet made his ascension?" 

"...Can't be. Would have brought the god down on us."

"Your faith is admirable."

_"I believe."_

"Enough to give up a hot meal?"

"...Bind him, brother. He'll be butchered just as well in the chapel."

The chapel has been burning. The air is thick with it. The smell of broiled fat. The gag in my mouth tastes like charcoal.

They want to see Father Martin.

I think that thing roasting on the stake is him.

The prisoners - the patients - I don't know what to call them anymore - are kneeling in the ashes, facing the embers. Some of them have burns. One of them lost his clothes when they caught fire, nothing left but charred cloth around his wrists and ankles, his genitals half melted. His jaw works but his face has all run together, his lips don't mouth the prayer. I wonder how long they've been there. I wonder how long they'll stay.

A new pastor is talking. The twins bow their heads, but in impatience.

"He said, 'I shall destroy this house, and no one will be able to build it...'"

His voice is high and almost female. He's smaller than the others. Long grey matted hair. There are no women here, I think. I'm glad. Nothing too bad has ever happened to me, but I know what it's supposed to be like. A man's imprint on the walls, like a nuclear shadow. So that you can't go places or speak words or do things without thinking of him. The way God's supposed to have his fingers all in everything, the space between the atoms, neuronal networks, gravitational law.

"Therefore I say, if he is destroyed, he will be filled with light, but if he is divided, he will be filled with darkness."

One of the twins starts pacing. And then I see it. Above their heads. Part of the roof. A beam, hot and sparking and ready to fall. It creaks, and my heart stops. And I'm praying, for the first time in my life, to myself, to anybody, to whatever dread God they pray to in a place like this.

"He said to him, "O man, who has made me a divider?" He turned to his disciples and said to them, "I am not a divider, am I?"

Please. Miles, please. Let it happen. Let me come home to you.

The pastor paused. "The Apostle of the Lord."

"Let the scales fall from our eyes," the twin responds, picking up a shard of wood the size of my arm and -

And then the wall splits open, not the way it should but arching red, a hot angry analemma, and we are consumed.


	17. [NOTE] Theology of the Body

"Miles Upshur is breaking this building," the pastor whispers, "he's in the walls."

He's laying on his back, spread-eagle, appropriately Christlike, with the beam burning into his belly, staring up at me through round and shining eyes. (And just now I see that someone cut his eyelids off. Maybe he did it to himself.)

"Get his name out of your mouth," I tell him, but my voice is harsh and cracked. My throat is dry. My lips are chapped. I'm trying to burn off my binds, I can smell the hair smoking on the back of my neck. Ten more seconds. Five. The pastor stares at my ankle as if it's a thing he can eat.

"He doesn't always know how to see, how to move. Let it be consumed, he whispers, and we are consumed, and he wanders the corridors looking for the drop of blood at the heart of this world. Endlessly. Endlessly. Where he walks the floorboards blacken beneath his feet. The Apostle of the Lord fears that in his rage he'll destroy the Gospel before he can lay claim to it again. You are his eyes and his heat and his hands. That's what you came back for. To give him succor." He paused. "The Apostle of the Lord," he recited.

"What the fuck?"

I think he's saying that Miles wanted me to come back for his camera. Not for him.

The pastor's lips thinned. "When was the last time you took Communion? You are unfamiliar with our mass."

"I'm an atheist," I tell him.

Just as my binds break off, he lunges at me. Tosses the beam aside like it's a toy and launches himself at me, screaming obscenities, and then before I even know what I'm doing I'm up in through the grate, in the air vents. The metal warm against my skin.

And he's down there shouting up at me, "HE THINKS YOU'RE BETTER OFF DEAD HE THINKS WE ALL ARE THE ONLY REASON THEY ARE ALIVE IS BECAUSE HE LETS THEM LIVE THEY ARE HIS DISCIPLES THEY ARE HIS AND THERE IS NO FREEDOM IN A WORLD WITH A LIVING GOD HE'S IN THE WALLS HE'S IN THE WALLS" and I'm thinking of your hands and your arms around me to keep myself from screaming when the gunfire goes off.

"The Apostle of the Lord," the pastor murmured, his throat thick with blood. 

"Whether I escape or die here I am free," the soldiers respond.

Each of soldiers turns his gun to his gas mask and pulls the trigger.


	18. [NOTE] Was this a dream

[NOTE] Was this a dream

Miles is kneeling on the bed with his jeans down around his thighs. He's got his wrists in handcuffs lashed around the steel bedframe and he's looking at me over his shoulder with a Marlboro stuck in his mouth.

I snap the picture.

Then he starts coughing. "This was a bad idea. Fuck." I pluck the cigarette from his mouth and toss it out the window. He exhales smoke out his nose like an irritated dragon. I lean over and kiss him. The nicotine on his lips tastes horrible. He's got stale wine on his breath. Somehow it makes me laugh. It suits him, all foul-mouthed and filthy-minded. It turns me on.

His lips meet mine again, insistently. He slips his tongue in my mouth. My hands move down to my belt.

"Fuck me," he murmurs. "Put your hands on me. Don't jerk me off. When I come I want you to know it was because you fucked me."

\-- Wait. When did this happen? This never happened to me.

The scene melts and reforms, and I have an old blanket wrapped around him, I'm holding him close, my nose buried in his hair. I'm cradling his hands in mine. Two of his fingers have been wrenched off. There's nothing there but mutilated stumps, and I can feel his pain shooting through us like a sunburst. I'm holding him like I can make it stop, trying to keep him standing upright as he pukes ...


	19. [DOCUMENT] I'm sorry.

[DOCUMENT] I'm sorry.

I've been thinking of you this whole time. You got me through this. Now I'm dreaming of you every night. I don't need to sleep anymore, but I can dream. I have to.

I don't know what I'm capable of now, Allen, and if I called you here I'll never forgive myself. I've been screaming your name inside my head.

Please know that it's real. You did love me. You never said anything but I was so sure. Leslie and I got into a fight back in August and she'd email me like "He doesn't even know you're gay, Miles, you have to say something before he moves on" and ... I don't think I can make those. Things on the outside, things in the past. When you get out (I will keep you alive, I promise you, I will move hell and earth) you can look at my Gmail account and they'll be there. The password is the cat's name backwards. I know it's so stupid, I'm sorry.

I hope to God I didn't make you do this. Didn't make you come here, didn't make you want me, didn't make you go after my camera to prove to me whatever it is you're trying to prove ... I would never. Not on purpose. Not at all.


	20. [NOTE] The topmost floors.

I've been ascending. Against my better judgment but according to my instinct. Happens almost by itself. They carried me off to the chapel, the wall collapsed and I crawled up through the ceiling. And yet I feel that I'm getting closer to the place I need to be. The lowest level.

The elevator's got chains all over the machinery. Wrapped up in it, gumming up the works. Maybe that's why it didn't save him again when it took Miles down to that place he told me about, that "lowest level." (I don't know how I know what he's done. Bits and pieces, impressions, things I feel like I remember but I don't. At this point I've stopped questioning it.) 

There's a man here. Naked like the rest. Tall and thin and dry like grass and bone. The word for it is dessicated. Like those monks who mummify themselves alive. (Maybe he had an eating disorder. It's co-morbid, sometimes, with symptoms of psychosis. Learned about that one in a cog sci class, some extended metaphor about system integration in our opening lecture. I wonder, now, whenever I see one of them, what excuse Murkoff gave to swallow them whole.) He's banging on the works with a wrench thicker than his arm. The wrench's head is bloody.

I watch him. Hoping if I leave him alone he'll solve this problem for me. Thought I was being quiet enough he wouldn't hear me over the racket, but he snarls, "Fixing the elevator! What does it look like I'm doing?" 

His lower lip has been severed but not the top. In spite of that his voice is strangely clear.

He sets back on his heel, his eyes watering. His wipes them with a grease-stained palm.

"'Let my shepherd's Apostle see it and spread it with his lies for a greater truth'..." he muttered to himself. "His lies..."

I don't know what you are now, Miles, and I know you've been protecting me, but when a man with blood all over him says your name my heart stops.

"What are you talking about?"

He looks at me as if he's just now seeing me. His eyes are Arctic grey, keen and intelligent and filled with tears. "You're a doctor, aren't you?"

"Yeah, sure." I'm too tired to argue with him. I wish to the God I know I'll never believe in that he'd go back to breaking those chains.

"Dr. Allen Li Goh," he whispers, moving my name around his mouth as if it's not a word but a breath of cold air, a copper taste in the back of his throat.

"I won't ask you how you know."

"He shows us things. Sometimes. He doesn't mean to." He scratched his straw hair.

How long have I been here? How long has it been since Miles disappeared? I thought it was four or five days. But now I feel like it's been less than that. And then in the next moment I feel like it's been more. 

I don't think time works the way it should here anymore. To the extent that time means anything. It's a human invention, a verbal conceit. A way of describing patterns. Proportions. Models of consistency. You might as well say Czech grammar doesn't work right here either. 

But even if this demiurge, this Walrider, didn't get his hand around the Newtonian dimension and squeeze time in his hot fist -maybe he can still make you perceive it as if he did.

I don't know what scares me more.

The Variant returns to his work.

"The hands of the beloved can be anyone's hands. God has no face and knows no face and made us in his image. Anyone can approach his altar. He remakes us whole, he can't tell us apart. Assembles the heavenly from a box of spares. A loving eye, a kind word, a hand in the dark. I can feel it. The need in him. He lived alone."

"Goddamn it..." I make a pained sound and look at the window, made matte black with night and rain. I don't even know how to begin making conversation with this man.

His fishbelly eyes twitch towards me. "Before he received the Word our Pastor Kenneth told us that long before we were born his God in Man set aside a number of people to save and the rest are doomed to hell. Father Martin spoke differently. Pastor Kenneth told him, 'I hope you don't believe that. As if God was some kind of _whore'_..."

Something about the way he said it ran a chill down my spine.

"Father Martin ordered the Pastor's eyes opened. And you, would you want a taste of heaven, knowing your ability to receive it makes meaningless all you could do on this earth? That you weren't judged for your sins or loved for your virtues but because God gave you all you are? Pastor Kenneth says man still has to make the choice to take it. Ridiculous. What part of you chooses that God didn't touch? He carved you into being. All that you are dictates you'll consent."

"That God loves you no matter who you are? Won't judge you for failing when he made you human and weak? I can get behind that. Honestly, at the end of the day, I'd rather not burn in hell just on principle."

I can't believe I'm arguing with him.

And some part of me is feeling around the edges of whatever horror the stranger holds in him and is screaming no no no, I don't want to be forced. I'm aware again, all of a sudden, of the man's nudity.

"God wants companions. He makes people who are like unto himself. Makes people who will - " and he grunts and hits the chain with extra force, the metal yelps like a kicked dog- "do what he does to people, the murderer, and sit up there in heaven, absolutely secure...all on a line up to heaven...he calls it love..."

He smiles. Or I should say the corners of his upper lip pull back from his teeth. Then his face shivers and softens. He sucks in a deep breath and presses his forehead to the chains. "The God is the Walrider. The Walrider. The true god, the righteous god. Hungry and constant. And unlike Man."

There's a fierceness in those wan eyes, sparked by absolutely nothing, and he rears back and strikes with his wrench and the chains fall apart and a second later I hear them ringing against a distant floor.

The man turns away from the elevator works and I can see he has an erection. 

"Tried to deprave it. To bring it down into the flesh. But the God alone is free." 

I jump for the elevator, try to move past him, thinking wrong, just wanting the speed and the gates between us. He catches me on the side of the head with the wrench and when I collapse into the car I dream of Miles, and we are drunk, my hands on his dark warm skin, holding his hips above me while he whispers, _Carve your name into my flesh. Don't laugh at me. I'm serious. Please. Before I lose who you are._

I hear something like a gale as the gates slam shut. A cry of agony. Then blessed silence.

When the gates open again, I'm underground.


	21. [NOTE] Whistleblower

This place is cold. Looks like an iceberg, feels like one too. My first thought is there might be server rooms. That Engine.

Feels better (almost better) seeing something technical, mechanical. Something tangible happens down here, something to do with fiber optic cables, copper pipes, computer screens, knowledge and industry, instead of whatever the fuck happens in that hellscape upstairs.

It's in less disrepair than the upper floors, and it's silent as the grave.

Somebody must have been trying to leave in a hurry, didn't make it. There's an open suitcase and a man's business casuals all over the hallway. Books ripped open. An empty wallet. Looks a bit like something tore it up in frustration. Tried to eat it, even. There's a laptop sitting there too.

I remember what Miles said with a jolt. That email to Leslie.

I put the laptop right-side up and find it's already turned on and logged in to one of those disposable temporary inboxes.

Hey.

That's him.

That's the whistleblower.

That's the one who brought him here.

I hope he's dead. I hope, for one moment, brief and weak and messy and unfair, with a strength and a purity that comes from a place so deep down inside of me I may never be able to fine it again, that whoever he is, I hope he's dead and suffering and in hell. And for a moment I think I'm one with that pastor's loving god.

Behind me the lights turn on.


	22. [DOCUMENT] Punished

[DOCUMENT] Punished

I love you.

Let me say that first off. I do. In and of itself there are no wrong reasons.

I've been finding you all this time. Your dim outlines, your points of light. I've been hunting every fragment I can snatch before it melts like ice in the heat of my hands. The more I fight the worse it gets. Like an animal trying to hold something live and trembling in its mouth and breaking it apart in its jaws. But I fell for you, Allen. Because I've seen it all. And I hope you want that, for me to love you and love all of you despite the fact that I know who you are.

I should have let you die, but I couldn't.

I should have done a million things.

You know me, Allen. You know what I wanted. Freedom and truth. I came here risking my life and career because Murkoff was fucking with people's heads and stealing everything they had from them. From their bodily integrity down to their minds. Because they owned people, because they changed them. My worst nightmare came true. Now I'm one of them. I have it in my skin.

You can't get it out of you once it's inside. Even I can't pull it out. I can't fix this now. I can't save me and you.

The Walrider loves me, Allen. It gives me everything I want. The Walrider is me. The Walrider is.

You know how God rages and God sins, Allen, how "vengeance is mine, saith the Lord", how his love and compassion are limitless? And how little sense any of it made at the end of the day, that bullshit about having to sacrifice himself to himself to pay for the sins he allowed?

I understand it all now. 

God deserves to be punished. God knows he needs to pay for this.

There are no methods. There are no limits. God is out of his own control. He warps dimensions around him like a...not like how you put it. Like a fist. That implies will. A god is like a rock in a net, all the lines bending towards its weight. A boulder parting a brook, a cliffside turning a river vertical. Our whole world's collateral damage, Allen. A burst from the roiling heart of the sun. Glances off this dead rock and life springs forth; in still waters, in cool grass. How can I explain this to you? I'm warping reality just by being there, and I'm angry, and I'm lonely, and I'm cold; and I don't know how to stop what's happening just because I _am._

God gave those he loves free will because God doesn't have it himself. It's the ones he hates he saves for his heaven.

I don't hate you. I promise you, I don't hate you. I don't know why this is happening to you and me.

I'll tell you everything but only if you want me to. Look down at your clothes. You're a patient.

I know who you really are.


	23. [NOTE] Leslie's email

It's not there.


	24. [NOTE] The camera

The camera is broken. It's riddled with bullets. It won't turn on. The hard drive's fucked. I'm sorry, Miles. I'm so goddamned sorry for it all.


	25. [NOTE] I don't want him to.

Let it be like this. The two of us all wrapped up in each other. Making the other live, making the other pay.

I love you too.

I don't care, Miles. About anything anymore. You are my will. Your broken body, my mutilated heart. I don't want to escape, I don't want to keep living. I just want to be where you are.

I can see you like a vision in me. Your fogged breath in the parking lot, your outstretched arms, your arching back. I want to lay with you in a cold bed in a cheap motel in the ugly and restless night. I want to find your rough hand in the sheets and run my fingertips along your fingers, over and over, until you sleep.

Make a little world for you and me. One where nothing bad will ever happen to you again.


	26. [NOTE] I think I see the way out.

And with that I stumble out of the exit. 

It's anticlimactic, sure. But the doors are open and aside from all the offal there's nothing stopping me. 

(That was a human being once, I reminded myself.) (Maybe four or five of them, even, says a vicious and intrusive voice, and I feel sick.)

Miles is smoking a cigarette out by his jeep. He looks tired. Looks human. He's got his hands in his jacket pockets and he's staring dully at that suitcase from downstairs. Somehow it got dragged out here. It's on fire. The clothes are burning, the books, all that's left of that portable life.

He gives me a nod when he sees me. "Hey."

"Hey. Um..." I hold up the camera. Miles sighs, but he doesn't sound surprised.

"Yeah. Okay. Maybe I could still get something off the hard drive," he says, his voice dull and devoid of conviction, "Or...wait, why are there two?"

"Well, I got the spare out of your truck. Looks like it's got a lot of other stuff on it, I don't know if you recorded on it any."

"The spare?"

"Well...it was just the camera in your truck."

His eyes soften a little bit. He nods. "...I think we should get that thing out of here."

He flicks the cigarette away and his lip trembles, compulsively. I come up behind him and embrace him and put my face in his hair.

"Don't..." he murmurs, and weakly turns his head.

I press my lips to his hair, print kisses there, as softly as I can. "It's okay, Miles."

"I'm sorry. I'm - "

"Stop, stop," I whisper. "I'm gonna take you home."

"Murkoff will be looking for us. They're gonna want my dark rider."

"I don't care. We have a couple hours. We'll throw some things in the trunk. I'll make breakfast. Put on the radio. Pancakes, bacon, eggs." 

"Yeah? What if I keep kosher?"

"Turkey bacon."

He exhaled a laugh, small and shaky. "I'm just fucking with you. I eat bacon but there's none in the house." 

"We'll stop at the store."

"You don't have money."

"We'll rob the store."

"Just take my wallet. It's in the truck."

I keep on holding him.

"We have to leave," he says quietly, though not before some time has passed.

He gets in the passenger's side, buckles his seatbelt. He rests his temple against the cold glass and sobs. Haltingly. Twice, three times. And then he stops. And that's all.

I reach across and take his hand. His fingers are missing. I stroke what's left of them and try to ignore the texture of dried blood. 

He toys with my camcorder, the one I found in the front seat of the jeep. "He made it out, you know? I wonder how far down the road he got before he turned back," Miles says.

"We don't have to talk about it. Please." To fill the silence I turn the engine over and reach for the radio, turn it on and down low. It's Johnny Cash. Everybody can at least tolerate Johnny Cash. I steal a glance at Miles and he doesn't seem to be an exception.

_I keep close watch on this heart of mine._  
I keep my eyes wide open all the time.  
I keep the ends out for the tie that binds.  
Because you're mine. I walk the line. 

I don't let go of his hand.

_As sure as night is dark and day is light._  
I keep you on my mind both day and night.  
And happiness I've known proves that it's right.  
Because you're mine. I walk the line. 

There are ashes in the ashtray. Miles empties it out the window before I can look at what's in it, ask him if it was something that belonged to me, the me from before. I see the corner of a charred photograph. Sleek black hair, a white jaw, a woman's smile. The kind of smile that sends a jolt right through your heart. It flutters away as I pull the truck out, turning over and over from color to white, and I catch a glimpse of the writing on the back.

Lisa. What a beautiful name.


End file.
